Hello everyone, I am back after having that long rest weekend that I needed the most.
This past week has been such an interesting week for me because not only was I not able to sleep, but my mind has been opening 50 different tabs at the same time while I was doing something else. And that experience really takes a lot of my energy inside of me. The funnier thing was, after having this situation, I thought for a second, 'Thank god, does that mean I will be able to rest well tonight? Surprisingly, nope. My body was insanely tired, but my mind tried so hard to reorganise the thoughts and life that I’ve been consciously building for myself so that it can reproduce the new type of reality for me the next day. Nonetheless, I’ll take this as a cool experience, and I’ll name it: “Is this how adulting works?”
Anyway, I went to the beach yesterday, and it was such an amazing sunny day that I needed it most to get those vitamin D and brain recovery after having all those big situations that were just happening in my mind, which made me become more sure of how powerful thoughts and emotional certainty are to be able to create the type of reality that we want.
The thing is, my system just quit looking for any dopamine-seeking and moved into that coherence one. What that means is the quality of my thoughts has been upgraded into a new, different level situation that made me experience that hard-to-sleep situation, which led me to this new theory I just had inside of my mind: “re-learning how to deal with our own lives”. I meant, come on, I used to be the most exercise-enthusiastic person you might ever know, or one of the kind who always really took care of what I put in my body. However, I just relearned that the person who did all of that turned out to have had a different motivation for doing that… I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have this healthy fit body now because of what I used to consistently do, but the missing point was I just realised when I did that, it was more for like a “validation” rather than me doing it as a gesture of I am taking care of my body because I care about myself.
That realisation alone changed my whole performance when I did my exercise now. Not just that, I realise that having intentional exercise was hard, but it actually taught me that it required a lot of anticipation and participation while I was doing it. Luckily, I found this sooner, so I was able to change those thoughts to create that new pattern of my health journey now.
Secondly, I would say everything that we “need” is definitely inside of us, just waiting for us to notice and release that version. Here’s another experience that I think was quite interesting. 1 year ago, when I was in that manifestation and spiritual freak journey, I found this one specific piece of content that I was always eager to watch because at that time I had my own theory that whenever that content appeared in my feed, it somehow led me to where I am today, but until 2-3 weeks ago, I never realised that the thoughts that I had while I consumed that content were more of "I want to prove that theory is working for me, and I’ll be able to achieve those same specific goals." It came to my realisation that it was not her experience she expressed through her voice, but that her life and my life were completely different, and somehow my subconscious was absorbing that content and putting it into that category without my consent. And here I am today, just metabolising that situation as “I used to see that as a meaningful situation that shaped me to become who I am today.” It was as if your thoughts were going into different levels; everything that you experience in your reality will change immediately.
Thirdly, I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, and this situation has been surprising me the most. Not only had my previous identity bought 2 different books that I never realised until now, but it turned out those were the books I actually needed right now. So I’ve been reading this book from Brené Brown about “Strong Ground”, and she introduced this author; his name is Adam Grant, and I love the part from the book where he talked about “rethinking and questioning what we know” + his work is about quantitative cognitive science and organisational psychology. She also mentioned his book, which is called “Think Again”. The title immediately caught my attention, and I used to instantly go to Google to get one, but this time I just kept reading her book instead. 2 days after, when I reorganised my shelves, it turned out I had had that book there the whole time, and in fact I had read some of it already, but I had completely forgotten!?!? Not just this, but of course I immediately started reading his book, and I found this part that really interested me the most: “We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995." Gosh, this part hit me the most because we as humans get used to our own comfort without consciously realising that template was working 5 years ago, whereas when we intend to grow, what that means is we need to constantly upgrade our system to be matched with what we intend to achieve in this life.
It got me to perceive that living with intention will be able to help you to see things for the way they are and act from that situation, rather than using your “prediction loops” brain to help you. Let me give you an example: all those restless nights that I had these past couple of days made me feel tired; however, instead of putting “I need to fix that, or something is wrong with me,” I simply labelled it as “my system has been upgraded to the next level,” and that integration immediately happened. Or rather than seeing my health journey as “Am I getting weaker here?”, I put that experience in a different type of category instead. I am also just learning about myself to be able to hold 2 different beliefs within me without getting anxiety that steers my mind into collapsing into just 1 belief. I think having those new skills definitely needs constant muscle memory training to strengthen enough to be able to create a large capacity to hold that.
Lastly, it is important to constantly check in with yourself to see if all those beliefs are still working for you or need to be changed daily, not once a month type of thing. Hence, having those intentional actions is extremely important rather than giving yourself up to that comfortable reflex that you didn’t know why you were doing. Another part that I like from Adam Grant is "We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard." The thing is, when you get used to having that comfortable situation where you don’t need to challenge your belief that leads you to be in that state of "uncertainty", that will never make you have the ability to upgrade your thoughts. When you choose to stay in that cage of yours because you simply know this is safe, but you know deep enough that you deserve a much better life within you, that just means you go into full ignorance mode, and that doesn’t bring you any benefits in the long run.
At the end of the day, growth is less about collecting new ideas and more about having the courage to release the ones that quietly expired. Our mind loves to recycle the same beliefs because they once kept us safe. But safety and expansion rarely live in the same room for long.
So maybe the real practice of living intentionally is simple: “Keep asking yourself if the version of you who formed that belief is still the one who should be in charge today.”
Your Subconscious Bestie,
Liona Veronica
